Obamacare Has to Go

Obamacare Has to Go

by Phyllis Schlafly

March 19, 2014

The surprise victory of Republican David Jolly for a congressional seat in Florida has given new life to voters who had been depressed about the power of the Obama campaign machine. Even more surprising to the media was that Obamacare turned out to be the winning issue for Republicans.

The Democratic congressional candidate outspent the Republican by a million dollars and it was a district that Barack Obama carried in 2012. But the Democratic candidate’s message about Obamacare, “fix, don’t repeal” and “mend, don’t amend” was a loser because the American people want Obamacare repealed.

The Democrats thought that Obama’s favorite legislation would be a political advantage by now. It would have given health insurance to millions of voters who never had it before, others would enjoy subsidies and free contraceptives, and all had confidence in Obama’s promise that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” (and your health insurance plan, and your hospital).

It must have been a rude awakening for many liberals to realize that it was all a lie and you really can’t keep your doctor or your insurance plan. Liberals now have to face the fact not only that Obama made a false promise, but that he and his staff knew it was a lie when they wrote those promises on his teleprompter.

Millions of Americans have had their health insurance canceled. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that Obamacare will cause more than two million Americans to lose their jobs.

Nancy Pelosi told members of Congress they had to pass Obamacare so we can all find out what’s in it. We are finding out more things we don’t like about it every day.

Obama’s game plan to dodge the Obamacare bullet is to announce an exemption or a waiver or a deadline change almost every week. The purpose seems to be to postpone as many obnoxious deadlines as possible so that they do not take effect until after this year’s November election.

The scholar Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute reports that the Administration has made 37 significant changes to Obamacare, at least 20 made unilaterally by Obama with his famous “pen.” Only 15 were made legally by Congress.

Obamacare is a disaster any way you look at it. It violates the Constitution by forcing individual Americans to buy things we don’t need or want, and to pay for other people to buy products we don’t approve of.

So what do we have to show for the high cost of Obamacare: lost jobs, fulltime jobs cut to part-time jobs, canceled health insurance policies, higher premiums for health insurance, a website that doesn’t work so people don’t know if they are signed up or not, and navigators to help us navigate the website who couldn’t pass a background check.

Obamacare was designed to conceal its extraordinary cost by depending on healthy young people signing up to compensate the insurance companies for the high costs of unhealthy seniors. And we’ve just discovered a previously unnoticed fine-print provision to require taxpayers to bail out the insurance companies if they lose money on that deal.

The Obama Administration is trying to save face by claiming that Obamacare’s only problems are with the website or implementation. In fact, the real problem is the Socialist mindset that the government can take over a sixth of our economy and do it better and cheaper, and that’s ridiculous because it ends up with higher taxes, more inconvenience, and lots of bailouts.

The big government takeover of an entire industry is driving up health care costs, imposing new taxes, increasing our national debt, encouraging Obama to function like a dictator by changing the law unilaterally, and destroying our once-great health care system.

The Administration claims that 4.2 million people have signed up, which is a lot fewer than the original 7 million goal. But the real joker is that many of those haven’t paid their first premium. Like shopping at the supermarket, they’ve put some items in their cart but they haven’t yet paid at the checkout counter so we don’t know the real numbers.

But we do know that more people have lost health insurance than have been able to get new insurance. The Associated Press reported that at least 4.7 million Americans received notices that their current health insurance policies were canceled, and that’s more than the 4.2 million who have signed up.

Most of Obama’s changes were to help Democratic 2014 candidates who are running away from Obamacare faster than they are running for office. The solution for Americans is to elect a conservative Senate in November that will repeal Obamacare.